As for the statistics part of the class this week, I found the work on z scores to be helpful. I am still a bit confused as to how to calculate it properly but a little more work on it and I will understand it just fine. I will also be glad when we are finished with this class. It has not been difficult but it has been quite a bit of work. Looking forward to moving on to the next class.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Decision Making - Week 5
This week we took a look at Google Trends. I have heard of people looking at this site before to see the latest hot topics on Google but I had never gone there myself. I liked that users can search keywords and see traffic on that topic over a period of time. Also, to be able to go back to that period of time to see the news and blogs posts related to the topics was nice. Overall, I think it is a good basic tool to gather information. As far as using it in a business setting, I do not think that this is an appropriate tool. There is not enough information given here to make wise business decisions.
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After spending a lot of time on Google Trends and Insights I have to agree with you. Plus, Google announced this free offering several years ago and went through periods where they did not update the data. Not exactly the platform I would want to rely on for market intelligence.
ReplyDeleteIt is cool from a pop culture standpoint. I tried to makes heads or tails out of State Senate race. I now see the merit in subscribing to a professional service like HitWise for data acquisition and analysis.
This course has been a stretch for me, too. I have had to knuckle down and really ponder the material at great length. I did find a z-score calculator which made the nice distribution graphs - but nowhere could I find how to plot one using Excel.